By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Every errand, every commute, every trip to see a friend, folded into a searchable database neither agreed to join and can’t opt out of.
Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington aren’t criminals. Neither has ever been named a suspect in anything. But over four months in 2025, cameras in Norfolk, Virginia, logged Schmidt’s car 475 times and Arrington’s 325 times — every errand, every commute, every trip to see a friend, folded into a searchable database neither agreed to join and can’t opt out of. With the Institute for Justice representing them, they sued, arguing that kind of comprehensive tracking amounts to a warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment. In January, a federal judge disagreed, ruling that Norfolk’s 176 cameras across 75 locations didn’t track enough of a person’s movements to count as the “whole” of their life — the same legal standard that shields most ALPR systems, including Maryland’s, from constitutional challenge. Schmidt and Arrington appealed to the Fourth Circuit — the same appellate court that covers Maryland — where the case now sits as Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, backed by amicus briefs from the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, all urging reversal.
The ground shifted under Norfolk’s winning argument.
Then, in the last two weeks, the ground shifted under Norfolk’s winning argument. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that police conducting a geofence search of Google location data need a warrant — and, more importantly for Schmidt’s case, the Court explicitly rejected the argument that a narrow, time-limited slice of a massive dataset is constitutionally fine just because it’s small. That was exactly the reasoning Norfolk used to win: 21 days of storage and 176 scattered cameras, the city argued, didn’t add up to tracking someone’s “whole” life. Chatrie says the size of the slice isn’t supposed to be the test at all. Legal analysts following the case now say Norfolk’s defense looks considerably weaker than it did in January.
There’s also a Maryland case sitting inside this fight already, and it cuts the other way from Norfolk’s win. In 2021, the full Fourth Circuit ruled en banc in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department that Baltimore’s own aerial surveillance program — a spy plane that photographed nearly the entire city and could retrace anyone’s movements for up to 45 days — violated the Fourth Amendment. Schmidt and Arrington’s own appellate briefing leans on that Baltimore precedent directly, arguing Norfolk’s ALPR network does the same thing at street level that Baltimore’s plane did from the sky. Maryland, in other words, already has binding appellate precedent suggesting sustained government tracking of ordinary people can be unconstitutional — a precedent that predates almost every Flock camera now running in the state, and one that Maryland’s own legislature and law enforcement agencies haven’t been asked to reckon with in that context.
Maryland already has binding appellate precedent suggesting sustained government tracking of ordinary people can be unconstitutional.
That’s the part of Maryland’s automated license plate reader buildout that gets lost when the conversation turns to ICE and federal data-sharing, as it should — that’s a real and urgent problem. But it’s not the only one. Long before anyone’s data reaches a federal agency, it’s already been captured, logged, timestamped, and stored by a private company on behalf of a police department, about a person who was never suspected of anything. That fact doesn’t depend on who else eventually sees it.
What gets collected, and about whom
Flock Safety’s cameras don’t wait for probable cause.
Flock Safety’s cameras don’t wait for probable cause. Maryland’s own ALPR statute is explicit about this: officers need no reasonable suspicion to use the system, and it’s designed to run continuously, cataloging every plate that passes rather than searching for a specific one. A camera on a Baltimore County commuter route or an Anne Arundel neighborhood street photographs the same law-abiding driver on the way to work, to church, to a medical appointment, to a lawyer’s office, day after day — building, plate by plate, what amounts to a movement history for anyone who drives regularly through a monitored area. Newer Condor-model cameras extend that further, using AI to detect and follow pedestrians in frame, not just vehicles. Leonardo’s SignalTrace add-on, deployed on the ELSAG cameras already confirmed operating in the Baltimore metro area, goes a step past that: it captures the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID signals emitted by phones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, and even a car’s own infotainment system, building what the company calls an “electronic fingerprint” that can identify a specific person’s device constellation even when no plate is visible at all.
None of this requires anyone to have done anything. It requires only driving, or walking, somewhere a camera can see.
When it goes wrong for someone with nothing to hide
“You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing.” — Sgt. Jamie Milliman
In Colorado, Sgt. Jamie Milliman of the Columbine Valley police used Flock data to accuse a woman named Chrisanna Elser of stealing a $25 package. Ring doorbell footage later obtained by the Colorado Sun captured Milliman telling her, “You know we have cameras in that town. You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing.” The charges were dropped. Elser told reporters it took her weeks of combing through her own metadata to prove her innocence, and that the experience left her sleepless — less bothered by being wrongly accused than by how ordinary it was for an officer to speak as though total tracking were simply the water everyone now swims in.
Less bothered by being wrongly accused than by how ordinary it was.
That’s a wrongful accusation. A separate, more personal category of harm shows up nationally in cases that have nothing to do with solving crimes at all. The Institute for Justice has documented more than 20 cases since 2021 of officers using ALPR networks to track romantic partners, exes, and in at least one case a stranger — a Kansas lieutenant tracking his estranged wife, a police chief tracking an ex-girlfriend hundreds of times, patterns that surfaced only because the people being tracked eventually found out and complained, not because any internal audit caught it first. Five Albany, Georgia, officers were fired and arrested this month for the same category of misuse, caught only after Flock introduced a new internal audit tool specifically built to flag it. None of the documented cases are in Maryland yet. That is different from there being none.
None of the documented cases are in Maryland yet. That is different from there being none.
The scale most residents don’t see
It’s an almost absurd image… exactly what happens when a surveillance system’s scale outpaces any city’s capacity to actually govern it.
Dayton, Ohio, offers the clearest illustration of what routine, unremarkable overreach looks like once someone finally audits it. After resident pressure forced the release of its Flock search logs this June, the city found more than 7,000 searches tagged to immigration enforcement over about a year and a half — the single most common search reason logged simply as “ICE,” 1,776 times — despite a city policy explicitly banning that use. City workers responded by pulling black trash bags over all 72 of Dayton’s fixed cameras, unable to confirm whether their contract even allowed them to switch the system off outright. Evanston, Illinois, did the same thing with its own cameras months earlier, for the same reason. It’s an almost absurd image, repeated in at least two cities now, and it’s exactly what happens when a surveillance system’s scale outpaces any city’s capacity to actually govern it.
None of that requires a driver to be a suspect in anything. It only requires having driven.
Maryland’s version of this question remains open, not answered. Montgomery County’s police department alone ran roughly 110 million plate reads in 2025. Anne Arundel has operated fixed cameras since 2012. Baltimore City, as MDBayNews has reported separately, is now layering a data platform on top of existing scans that can cross-reference ten years of a driver’s location history, activity history, and social media activity — and identify “connections between cars that happen to be within a quarter mile of each other,” according to contract documentation reviewed by Baltimore Brew. None of that requires a driver to be a suspect in anything. It only requires having driven.
Maryland’s version of this question remains open, not answered.
What thirty days of retention actually means
Thirty days of continuous, warrantless tracking… is still enough to reconstruct a detailed picture of where a specific person goes, how often, and with whom.
Flock’s standard policy — and Maryland’s own §3-509 — caps most local retention at 30 days unless the data becomes evidence in a case. That sounds like a meaningful limit until it’s weighed against volume: 30 days of continuous, warrantless tracking of every vehicle passing a fixed point is still enough to reconstruct a detailed picture of where a specific person goes, how often, and with whom, for anyone with database access and a reason — legitimate or not — to look. And Maryland’s own fusion center, the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, holds submitted data for up to a year once it reaches the state server, a materially longer window than the 30-day figure most residents would recognize if they’d heard of the limit at all.
The question Maryland hasn’t asked yet
No Maryland official has said anything, on the record, about what a reversal would mean here.
This isn’t a settled area of law where Maryland can safely assume its own ALPR programs are in the clear — it’s a live, moving fight, and Maryland already has a stake in it that neither state officials nor the legislature has publicly addressed. The Fourth Circuit, which governs Maryland along with Virginia, is currently deciding whether Norfolk’s ALPR network violates the Fourth Amendment, weighing its own 2021 Baltimore aerial-surveillance precedent against a Supreme Court ruling from two weeks ago that undercuts the exact defense Norfolk used to win the first round. If the Fourth Circuit reverses, the reasoning would apply directly to Maryland’s own ALPR networks — the same court, the same circuit, the same constitutional question, just a different state’s cameras. No Maryland official has said anything, on the record, about what a reversal would mean here.
What’s missing from Maryland’s own version of this debate is anyone testing it independently.
What’s missing from Maryland’s own version of this debate is anyone testing it independently of that appeal. Illinois found its problem through a state-ordered audit. San Francisco found its problem through a routine compliance check. Dayton found its problem by finally reading its own audit logs, after residents demanded them. Maryland has never run any of those exercises publicly, on the record, focused specifically on how many ordinary, uninvolved residents’ movements are sitting in a database at any given moment — not because of who might eventually access it, but because of what it means that it exists at all.
This piece is a companion to MDBayNews’ earlier reporting on Flock/ALPR data-sharing with federal immigration authorities in Maryland. No Maryland resident has yet come forward publicly to describe being wrongly flagged, tracked, or investigated using ALPR data. If that’s happened to you, MDBayNews wants to hear from you.
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